 | | Golf Digest+ Insider | | By Max Adler March 1, 2022 |
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| | By Max Adler March 1, 2022 |
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|  |  | None of us really know Bryson DeChambeau
Sign up for Golf Digest+ to get exclusive emails like this from Golf Digest editors. | These are curious times for Bryson DeChambeau, who is riding a streak of three injury-related withdrawals and one upholding of his commitment to the PGA Tour. In Monday’s video post, he didn’t specify whether it was his hip or hand that was keeping him from defending his title at this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. Last month the enigmatic star decried false media reports and stated that “Any news regarding my health or playing schedule will come directly from me and my team only.”
For all the exotic behavior that might have made him the Saudi-backed golf league’s highest compensated player—unusual clubs, colossal weight gain, complex practice aids, physics exhortations and more—it’s hard for any of us to say we know what really makes DeChambeau tick, now seven years since his rookie season. He remains a different and most compelling cat.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to know an outsider. That’s why we hired writer Chris Jones of Esquire fame, who has won national magazine awards for writing about things like astronauts and dead soldiers (in a word, the unknowable), to take a crack at DeChambeau. Jones happens to be golf-bit, a high-handicapper living in Ontario without, but passionately wanting, a club membership. However far that sets the distance between him and his subject.
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| Jones planned to travel to Kapalua in January to watch DeChambeau at the Sentry, but Canadian quarantine rules got in the way. His request for a one-on-one interview with the golfer was considered, then politely declined. The closest Jones got to DeChambeau was the group setting of a Zoom media press conference organized by the Saudi International. It’s partly for this reason that Jones’ story is titled “Bryson DeChambeau Has a Headache,” a nod to the landmark 1966 profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese in which the writer never actually speaks to the singer but encircles him with study from every angle to reveal his inner workings.
Jones has a preternatural ability to see beyond what’s in plain sight, such as what to make of DeChambeau recently wearing an ordinary baseball cap. As Jones observes, “[It’s] essentially a battle over conformity, and there is something painful about watching someone atypical getting the most interesting facets of his personality worn down by the braying of normies, the way wind turns rock into dust.”
The other reasons for the title are no less than the sum of every word in this exquisitely crafted analysis, which you can read in full here.
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Max Adler, Editorial Director
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